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On the Death of the Empress Fausta Greece & Rome, Vol. xlv, No. 1, April 1998 ON THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS FAUSTA By DAVID WOODS Fausta, or Flavia Maxima Fausta to call her by her full name, was the daughter of one western emperor, Maximianus Herculius (286-305), the sister of another, Maxentius (306-12), and the wife of a third, Constantine I (306-37).l She was married to Constantine in 307, and bore him at least five children from 316 onwards, three sons (Con- stantine, Constantius, and Constans), and two daughters (Constantina and Helena).2 Following his defeat of his rival Licinius at the battle of Chrysopolis in 324, and the unification of the empire under his rule as the sole Augustus once more, Constantine honoured with the title of Augusta both his wife Fausta and his mother Helena, as is revealed by the issue of coins in their names each with this title.3 However, tragedy struck in 326 when Constantine appears to have executed first his eldest son Crispus, then Fausta herself. The reason for these executions, and the extent to which these deaths were related, has attracted a great deal of debate. Yet more remains to be said about the manner in which Fausta died, which may well provide an important clue as to the full circumstances of her death, whether she was executed, died by accident, or committed suicide even. Thus, it is my intention here, firstly, to offer a new explanation for the manner of her death, and secondly, to draw attention to an overlooked allusion to her death in a late Latin source, the Historia Augusta. I. How did Fausta die? Let us begin with a brief catalogue of the more important sources for the deaths of Crispus and Fausta, that is, those sources which do not simply note the occurrence of these executions, but seek to provide some detail also concerning their full circumstances:4 (i) The anonymous author of the Latin Epitome de Caesaribus, com- posed c.396, wrote as follows (Eptt. 41.11-12):5 But when Constantine had obtained control of the whole Roman Empire by means of his wondrous success in battle, he ordered his son Crispus to be put to death, at the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:13:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1093/gr/45.1.70 ON THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS FAUSTA 71 suggestion of his wife Fausta, so they say. Then he killed his wife Fausta by hurling her into boiling baths (in balneas ardentes coniectam), when his mother Helena rebuked him with excessive grief for her grandson. (ii) According to the surviving epitome of his work by the 9th-century scholar Photius of Constantinople, the Arian ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius, who wrote c.425, claimed that (HE 2.4) :6 ... Constantine was induced by the fraudulent artifices of his step-mother to put his son Crispus to death; and afterwards, upon detecting her in the act of adultery with one of his cursores, ordered the former to be suffocated in a hot bath (-nj TOO Xovrpov dAe'a (iii) Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Arvernum in Gaul c.471-87, wrote to a friend in praise of his poetry, stating that (Epist. 5.8.2):8 ... no greater power of satiric suggestion was shown by the consul Ablabius when in a couple of verses he stabbed at the life and family of Constantine and put his tooth into them with this distich posted up secretly on the door of the palace: Who would now want the golden age of Saturn? Ours is a diamond age - of Nero's pattern. He wrote this, of course, because the aforesaid Augustus had almost simultaneously got rid of his wife Fausta with a hot bath (cahre balnei) and his son Crispus with cold poison.9 (iv) A pagan historian of the early 6th-century, Zosimus, probably working at Constantinople, did little more than abbreviate the work of a late 4th-century pagan historian, Eunapius, and reported that (HN 2.29.2):10 Without any consideration for natural law he [Constantine] killed his son, Crispus, who, as I have related before, had been considered worthy of the rank of Caesar, on suspicion of having had intercourse with his stepmother, Fausta. And when Constantine's mother, Helena, was saddened by this atrocity and was inconsolable at the young man's death, Constantine as if to comfort her, applied a remedy worse than the disease: he ordered a bath to be over-heated (ftaXaveiov yap {mkp TO plrpov iKTTvpwdijvai.) and shut Fausta up in it until she was dead.11 (v) The Passion of Artemius, a largely fictitious account of the trial under the emperor Julian of the general (dux) Artemius, which depends for much of its historical information on the work of Philostorgius above, and was probably written in the 8th century by the theologian John of Damascus, attributes to Artemius a speech which includes the following (Art. Pass 45) :12 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:13:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1093/gr/45.1.70 72 ON THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS FAUSTA Constantine did kill his wife Fausta - and rightly so, since she had imitated Phaedra of old, and accused his son Crispus of being in love with her and assaulting her by force, just as Phaedra accused Theseus' son Hippolytus. And so according to the laws of nature, as a father he punished his son. But later he learnt the truth and killed her as well, exacting the most righteous penalty against her. (vi) Writing in the 12th-century, although with access to early 4th-century sources, the Greek historian Zonaras claimed (Epit. 13.2.38-41):13 His [Crispus'] stepmother Fausta was madly in love with him but did not easily get him to go along. She then announced to his father that he [Crispus] loved her and had often attempted to do violence to her. Therefore, Crispus was condemned to death by his father, who believed his wife. But when the emperor later recognized the truth he punished his wife too because of her licentiousness and the death of his son. Fausta was placed in an overheated bath (tloaxOeCoa yap hi Xovrpw ... ocf>o&pcbs ixKavdevTi) and there found a violent end of her life.14 So what do modern commentators make of these unsavoury allega- tions? Obviously something terrible happened. Not only were Crispus and Fausta executed, but their memory was also condemned (damnatio memoriae). Their names were erased from public inscriptions, and the literary record was similarly affected.15 Eusebius of Caesarea, for example, revised later copies of his Ecclesiastical History in order to omit earlier material in praise of Crispus, and his Life of Constantine which he composed c.338 makes no mention whatsoever of either Crispus or Fausta.16 Yet there has been marked reluctance in recent times to accept the allegations of a sexual scandal, that Crispus and Fausta had become embroiled in an intimate relationship for which they both paid with their lives.17 Hence P. Guthrie, for example, has argued that the execution of Crispus was a dynastic murder by Constantine in order to remove his eldest and illegitimate son from the succession in favour of his three legitimate sons by Fausta.18 This has been ably refuted by H. A. Pohlsander who, among his other arguments, pointed out that the appointment of Crispus to the rank of Caesar in 317 had already proved his eligibility for the rank of Augustus, and that Constantine was unlikely to regard illegitimacy as a bar to succession, being illegitimate himself also.19 Yet argument and counter-argument both suffer serious flaws, the former more so, in that it is not at all clear that Crispus and Constantine were actually illegitimate. Many scholars now deny this.20 More importantly, this theory does not explain why Constantine had Fausta executed also, nor the unusual manner of her death. In brief, it pays too little attention to what the sources themselves actually say in this matter. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.40.139, on 29 Sep 2021 at 09:13:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1093/gr/45.1.70 ON THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS FAUSTA 73 Another theory has some merit in that it does at least accept that there was a real connection between the deaths of Crispus and Fausta. According to N. J. E. Austin, Crispus had his future predicted, and Fausta reported this to Constantine as a conspiracy against his rule.21 He executed Crispus immediately, but soon repented of his haste when he discovered that there was little basis to her allegation. Consequently, he held her responsible for Crispus' death, and executed her also. Again, this explanation of events pays too little attention to the testimony of the sources themselves. It ignores the allegations of adultery, nor does it sufficiently explain the unusual manner of Fausta's death. Furthermore, as J. W. Drijvers notes, it does not explain why the condemnation of Crispus' memory was not reversed when it emerged that he was innocent.22 If Fausta had been killed because her charge against Crispus was discovered to be false, then his memory ought to have been restored and commemorated accordingly.
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